And the Oscar-Pool Winners Are...the Stats Dudes

By

Carl Bialik

Updated Feb. 23, 2013 10:22 a.m. ET

The quants have arrived at the Academy.

To the Oscar-winner pickers in office pools and living rooms, now add computer programmers and statistical modelers. Some of this new breed of awards forecasters are movie-mad, while others don't much care about the silver screen, but all see an opportunity in the Hollywood showcase to test their prediction methods and demonstrate their statistical mettle.

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"We thought Oscars predictions would be a great way to have a platform to talk about data science, in a way consumers and executives would like," said
Michael Gold,
chief executive of Farsite Group, a Columbus, Ohio, company that, outside of this glitzy sideline, applies statistical analysis to real estate. Farsite predicts "Argo" is the film most likely to end the ceremony Sunday by being named best picture, with a probability of 45.6%.

Not all veteran Oscar forecasters are impressed by their new competition. "I know there is no scientific way of predicting the Oscars," said
Scott Feinberg,
awards analyst for the Hollywood Reporter, a film-trade publication. Mr. Feinberg notes that the awards are handed out by the roughly 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and no statistical model can substitute for what he calls "underground intelligence" about their "subjective, whimsical preferences."

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Mr. Feinberg, too, backs "Argo," though he hesitates to call it a lock as its director,
Ben Affleck,
wasn't nominated for best director. Just one film in the past 80 years—"Driving Miss Daisy," in 1990—has won best picture without its director getting a nomination.

There is a divide, too, among the data-driven forecasters. Some apply historical patterns, such as the close link between the best-picture and best-director awards, to this year's field. They aren't totally sold on "Argo," due to the Affleck snub, but the thriller keeps its favorite status owing to its strong showing in other award shows.

Meanwhile,
Microsoft Research
,
an experimental arm of the software giant, bases its predictions almost entirely on betting markets such as Intrade, where people are putting money behind their picks. The Microsoft forecast gives "Argo" a 93.4% chance of winning.

"I'm amazed how far some of these have gone toward the high 90s," said
David Rothschild,
an economist for Microsoft Research, about predictions for several Oscar winners with probabilities above 90%. "These seem high, but if the data say what the data say, you have to go with it."

Statistically based forecasts such as Dr. Rothschild's gained attention during the presidential election for correctly forecasting President Barack Obama's comfortable victory. While that surge of goodwill for stats has helped drive the quants' interest in the Oscars, the forecasters say the two votes are more different than they are alike.

While dozens of pollsters surveyed eligible voters for their preferences before last November's election, the identity of Academy voters isn't publicly available, and polling them isn't practical. Nearly every American 18 and older is eligible to vote for president, but only the Academy's members have a say in Oscar awards. And according to a Los Angeles Times report last year, Academy members differ from the average American adult: 94% were white, 77% were men and their median age was 62. After each election, forecasters have a wealth of data with which to fine-tune their models, but Academy watchers get no more information than do television viewers on Sunday night: the list of winners. Their vote share, and that of other nominees, isn't made public.

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A replica of the Oscar statue in Hollywood on Friday.
European Pressphoto Agency

Past voting numbers "would be really great data to have," said Christopher Beaumont, a graduate student in astrophysics at the University of Hawaii who created his own forecasting model this year to break a three-year Oscar-contest winning streak by his brother, Jon. Without such data, "There's a high level of intrinsic uncertainty about who's going to win. To some extent, it's just kind of random," he said.

Still, the forecasters say their approach beats intuition, which can be led astray by anecdotes that don't fit the data. Actor Peter O'Toole stunned the Academy a decade ago by initially rejecting an honorary award, saying that accepting it might end his chances of winning an Oscar by vote. But his intuition was at odds with the case of two honorary winners in the 1980s who went on to win acting Oscars later that decade. Mr. O'Toole eventually accepted the award and four years later was nominated for best actor but didn't win.

The statistical models have also uncovered some surprises. British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards, for example, are much better than the Golden Globes at predicting Oscar wins, said
Ben Zauzmer,
a sophomore at Harvard University who is predicting winners for the second year.

The goals in making these predictions extend beyond Sunday. Dr. Rothschild is testing whether surveying people online about Oscar patterns—for example, does winning best-adapted screenplay correspond with winning best picture?—is a method that can be translated to forecasting in other areas. If it works, "We can apply it to all sorts of other things we don't have data for," Dr. Rothschild said.

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